A semi-technical overview of “CGSpace”
DSpace at ILRI
Alan Orth
KAINET Open Data and Open Science’ Workshop
Nairobi, Kenya, 18 June 2015

History of DSpace at ILRI
● 2009: ILRI launches Mahider (“repository” in
Amharic)
● 2010: Other CGIAR centers and programs join
our platform and share hard / soft costs
● 2011: Rebranded as “CGSpace”
● 2015: 9 CGIAR centers, ~50,000 items, ~250k
hits/month

“CGSpace” in June, 2015

How we use DSpace
● Content people embedded in each department
help capture results (presentations, papers,
brochures, etc)
● Primary location for institutional outputs!
● No posting PDFs on corporate website!
● Integrate with website and blogs via RSS feeds
● Direct ALL traffic to DSpace!
● For data sets, videos, etc we make a metadata-
only accession with a link to eg YouTube

● Communities, sub-communities, and collections
● Tempting to model after organization hierarchy!
● (we did)
● … but organization hierarchies change!
DSpace hierarchies

Mostly organized by output type now...

Metadata
● Standard Dublin Core is available
● No AGROVOC
● You can create custom controlled vocabularies in
arbitrary namespaces, eg: cg.subject.ilri

Custom metadata in ILRI report
Not AGROVOC!

“Discovery” facets
● Context-aware
metadata summaries
● Side effect: helps
spot metadata
inconsistencies!
● … Open Access, Open
access, open Access,
etc.

Search engine optimization (SEO)
Help Google Scholar consume your content!
● XML sitemaps
● Consistent domain name, eg: cgspace.cgiar.org
● Persistent links for resources
● Website speed and HTTPS both a plus
● Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools to submit
sitemap, control indexing, see stats, etc

Sitemap view in Google Webmaster Tools

Importance of persistent links
● Website addresses change…
● mahider.ilri.org -> cgspace.cgiar.org
● But resources stay the same!
http://hdl.handle.net/10568/67073
● “Handle” service from handle.net
● Everything under prefix 10568 is CGSpace
● Default DSpace handle prefix is 123456789!

dc.identifier.uri specifies an item’s persistent universal resource identifier (URI)

Getting data INTO DSpace
● Day-to-day submission is manual, by a small
army of editors
● One-time batch uploads of items from other
systems in CSV format (InMagic!)
● OAI-PMH for metadata only
● OAI-ORE for metadata + bitstreams (eg, from
another DSpace or Sharepoint, etc)
● SWORD (haven't tried)
● REST API (DSpace 5+, haven't tried)

Getting data OUT OF DSpace
● REST API for structured JSON or XML
● OAI-PMH for metadata
● OAI-ORE for metadata + bitstreams (PDFs, etc)
● RSS feeds for websites / blogs
● XML sitemaps for search engines*
*Google discontinued the use of OAI for discovering
site content in 2008!
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008
/04/retiring-support-for-oai-pmh-in.html

CCAFS website, driven by Drupal + DSpace APIs

“Latest outputs” on project blog populated via RSS, links to CGSpace

Open source workflow on GitHub
https://github.com/ilri/DSpace

Skills needed in your organization
Besides content people(!)...
● Prioritize Linux systems administration
experience (Tomcat, httpd, PostgreSQL, DNS,
SSH, git)
● General: computer science background
● Web developers a diverse bunch...
● Java development experience doesn't hurt

Extra considerations
● Item mapping
● Maintenance tasks (background batch jobs)
● Backups of assetstore and PostgreSQL!
● Altmetrics tracks social media mentions
● Separate production / development
environments
● CGSpace server is $80/month
● ~20GB of PDFs, ~8GB of Solr data

Getting help
● “DSpace Tech” mailing list
● “dspace” tag on StackOverflow website
● a.orth@cgiar.org